This article should, by rights, be an entire book: the consequences of agricultural commoditization are profound and far-reaching. By necessity, I am concentrating on a few key points.

Where’s The Real Food?

One of the largest movements in 20th century agriculture was the commoditization of food.

In 1900, 41% of the US workforce was directly employed in agriculture, and each farm produced over five different crops for sale—not counting food consumed on the farm or sold locally, outside the commodity system. Furthermore, 60% of Americans lived in rural areas. (Source: USDA.) This means that the majority of Americans either grew their own food, or had direct access to the producers of the food they ate.

In 2000, just 1.9% of Americans were employed in agriculture, farms produced an average of just over one crop for sale, and less than 1 out of 4 Americans lived in rural areas. The number of farms has fallen 63%, while the average farm size has risen 67%.

In other words, we no longer have direct access to the food we eat. How did this happen?

As usual, the answer is simple: follow the money.

A Silly and Far-Fetched Scenario

Let’s consider a silly and far-fetched scenario for a moment.

The US government decides that Hollywood’s dominance of the world entertainment industry should be encouraged at the creative end as well as the financial end, and offers the following incentive:

“We will pay $100 for every new song of two minutes or longer, recorded in English by an American citizen in America, upon registration with the Copyright Office.”

(Subject to a raft of rules and red tape, of course.)

Right away we can see the problem: there is no incentive to write a song that anyone else wants to hear! The only incentive is to write lots and lots of ‘songs’…and it would probably take about six hours for enterprising programmers to write song-generation programs that put together random chord progressions and random sentences off the Internet, automatically play them with a synthesizer, and send them into the Copyright Office as quickly as they could record the vocals.

In other words, such an incentive would not result in more entertainment: it would result in a tsunami of unlistenable crap.

Commoditization: What Does “Fungible” Mean?

The definition of a commodity is “a good supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.” This property is called “fungibility”.

Sadly, the term “fungible” has nothing to do with either fungi or dirigibles. A fungible good is capable of mutual substitution: one unit is defined to be just as good as any other.

We can see that fungibility is a necessary property of money. If I loan you 100 dollars, I don’t expect to get the same $100 back I loaned to you…any $100 will do, because dollars are fungible.

Similarly, we can see that fungibility is a necessary property of commodities. If I contract to deliver you 1000 pounds of copper in March of next year, you shouldn’t have to care where the copper comes from.

Fungibility also applies to agricultural commodities: if I contract to deliver 100 bushels of corn in September of next year for a set price, it’s clearly impossible for you to inspect or evaluate corn that I haven’t even grown yet! So certain minimum standards for delivery are defined—and beyond that, all corn is the same.

Like most commodities, grains are mixed without regard to source: the producers sell their corn, whereupon it’s transferred via an elevator to a silo and mingled with all the other corn from the area, and anyone who buys corn simply gets whatever comes out of the elevator first.

We can see that an attempt to make non-fungible creations (songs) into a fungible commodity, as in the silly example above, would result in both an oversupply of unlistenable songs and an economic catastrophe.

Problem #1: Real Food Is Not Fungible

The alert reader will see several problems with this “fungible food” scenario right away. The first problem is that real food is not fungible.

For instance, when we go to buy onions, tomatoes, melons, or other produce, we don’t just choose them at random. We choose the variety that will taste best in our recipe, and from that, we choose the ripest, least damaged, best-looking, best-smelling ones available. We may even reject all the choices as unsuitable and visit a different store…or the farmer’s market.

A grain elevator.

Unfortunately, when a food becomes commoditized, we no longer have that choice. There’s no such thing as artisanal corn syrup, soybean oil, or textured vegetable protein: they’re made from commodity crops, and you’ll get whatever came out of the grain elevator.

Problem #2: Fungibility Begets Mediocrity

The second problem, which is a consequence of the first, is that fungibility begets mediocrity.

Consider: if you are a farmer, and the only standard for corn is that there be as many bushels of it as you contracted to deliver, are you going to care about nutrition? About taste? About pesticide contamination?

No. You’re not going to care about anything but producing the maximum quantity possible for the least cost, because it doesn’t matter. You can produce the most nutritious corn in the world…but you won’t be paid any more for it than your neighbor who’s just trying to cut costs.

Furthermore, we can see that agricultural price supports make this problem far worse. Think back to the songwriting example above: if you’re absolutely guaranteed to get paid by Uncle Sam as long as your ‘song’ is two minutes or greater, why bother creating anything meaningful? You’ll make far more money by creating unlistenable crap as quickly as you can.

Similarly, if you’re growing a crop (such as corn, wheat, cotton, or soybeans) that receives price supports, you’re not going to care about taste, nutrition, or any other measure of quality—let alone topsoil depletion or groundwater contamination. You’re paid by the bushel, and all that matters is how many bushels you can grow.

Is it any wonder that these “commodity crops” are so devoid of nutrients that products made from them must, by law, be “fortified” with vitamins and minerals in order to avoid massive outbreaks of deficiency disease?

Follow the money. We get what we reward.

Problem #3: Fungibility Impoverishes Farmers And Enriches Middlemen

The next problem I’ll discuss here is a consequence of the first two. It’s less obvious, but more far-reaching: turning a crop into a fungible commodity impoverishes farmers and consumers, while enriching middlemen.

Wagyū beef. To get this much fat inside your own muscles, make sure to feed yourself a similar diet of whole grains!

When selling your goods outside the commodity system, you can receive a better price for goods of better quality. To choose an extreme example, the highest grades and best cuts of Wagyū beef sell for well over $100/pound in Japan. More realistically, grass-finished beef sells for a 1.5-3x premium over feedlot beef, so individual producers can make a living selling quality meats.

However, if you’re forced into the commodity system, where you receive the same price for your crop regardless of quality, that means you can no longer differentiate your crop from anyone else…

Processors and other middlemen benefit dramatically from this arrangement: they use these cheap commodity crops as raw materials to produce a bewildering variety of packaged pseudo-foods, which they differentiate and sell at the markup that used to belong to producers of actual food.

Most products in the snack and breakfast aisles are made from disassembling artificially cheap corn into its constituent parts, adding some artificial flavoring and coloring, and reassembling them into something that costs more per pound than pork, chicken, or hamburger. Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, Corn Flakes, Corn Pops...

Furthermore, this allows the financial industry to profit by “making the market” (inserting themselves as middlemen in all transactions, e.g. “futures”), taking another slice of income out of the farmer’s remaining profit margin, and increasing prices to us at the supermarket.

All this fun doesn't come for free.

Here’s an illustrative example: since eggs are not completely fungible, an egg farmer—even a giant industrial egg farmer—makes over fifty cents per dollar of eggs sold. A corn farmer makes about four cents per dollar of corn syrup.

Problem #4: Fungibility Causes Environmental Devastation

The final problem I’ll discuss here is the environmental devastation wrought by commodity agriculture.

When commoditization prevents anyone from earning a margin on their crops by differentiating theirs from everyone else’s, and the market is further distorted by artificial incentives to produce as much as possible without regard to quality, we can expect that an unsustainable exploitation of resources will quickly result.

Conclusion: Eat Food, Not Commodities

The problems of industrial agriculture are primarily caused by a combination of commoditization and the broken farm policy that subsidizes it, leading to massive overproduction of corn, wheat, and soybeans that generates profits for middlemen and the financial industry at the direct expense of farmers and the consumer…

“First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.”

The paleo movement grew slowly for many years in the obscurity of Stage 1, and spent perhaps a year in Stage 2 being mocked as the “caveman diet”. Now, after several years of exponential growth and a stubborn refusal to be co-opted, we have finally achieved Stage 3, “Then they fight you.”

The latest example, of course, is the dismissive baloney pushed by the “experts” hired by US News and World Report, which ranks paleo dead last among 20 different diets—behind such food-free nutritional gimmicks as Slim-Fast and the Volumetrics Diet.

Also, the reader votes for “Did this diet work for you?” show that paleo is by far the most successful of the diets, with several thousand “Yes” votes and under 100 “No” votes. The only other diets to win more “Yes” than “No” votes were Weight Watchers and Atkins!

Update: The above is no longer true, as the Birdseed Brigade has apparently decided not only to upvote vegan and vegetarian diets en masse…they’ve decided to downvote all the meat-based diets, including Paleo, Atkins, South Beach, and Zone! (Thus illustrating the difference between our communities: we don’t attempt to silence or censor those who disagree with us.)

Previous to that, we’ve seen the repeated hatchet jobs on grass-fed beef by John Stossel (one in print and one on video), both of which use as their sole source non-peer-reviewed “research” from a scientist sponsored entirely by Elanco—a subsidiary of Eli Lilly that manufactures antibiotics and hormonal growth promoters for feedlot cattle, pigs, and chickens! President Obama’s personal trainer, in a breathtakingly stupid article, has called paleo “the newest nutritional fad”. (Solid rebuttal here.) And the avalanche of anti-paleo articles by “qualified experts” has justbegun.

We might expect this sort of offensive from the American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetic Association, because anyone eating any variation on the paleo diet is essentially telling them “All of you have been completely wrong for decades, and your bad advice is killing millions of people each year.” And we might expect this sort of offensive from the PCRM, because they’re just a front for vegans and animal rights activists.

But why such hostility from the mainstream press? The paleo movement doesn’t have the anti-establishment politics of, say, the vegan movement—or, as far as I can tell, any clear politics at all. If anything, it tends towards a casual sort of conservative libertarianism, but that’s probably just because so many paleo bloggers are semi-retired techies. It seems unlikely that “going paleo” is the cause of anyone’s political beliefs.

The answer, of course, lies in the age-old admonition:

“Follow the money.”

Adding Value: The Foundation Of Functional Economies

An economy based entirely on selling the same things back and forth to each other for ever-increasing amounts of money is doomed to eventual collapse. As we found out just a couple years ago, flipping houses isn’t the same as having a manufacturing base and a world that wants to buy what we make.

Stated more generally, an economy is only sustainable to the degree that its participants add value by their actions. Factory workers add value by turning raw materials into clothes and cars and electronics; farmers turn seeds and soil and sunlight into crops; ranchers turn calves and grass into beef; engineers turn ideas into buildable products; truckers move things from where they are to where they’re wanted; cashiers and stockers and managers and janitors turn a locked building full of things into a system by which you can find what you want and exchange money for it; and so on. Added value – cost of design – cost of production = profit.

This is not to be confused with the labor theory of value, which claims that labor has intrinsic value, and indeed, is the only ‘fair’ measure of value. This is hogwash. It’s easy to spend years of effort and not add a single penny of value—because value is determined by the buyer, not the seller. It doesn’t matter how much time I’ve spent making a coat rack if it’s ugly and no one wants to buy it!

Moving ahead: the more value we can add, the more profit we can make. It should be obvious that one way to add value is to transform cheap raw materials into an expensive finished product.

One reason grains are so cheap in the USA, of course, is gigantic subsidies for commodity agriculture that, while advertised as helping farmers, go mostly to agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland ($62 billion in sales), Cargill ($108 billion), ConAgra ($12 billion), and Monsanto ($11 billion)—and result in a corn surplus so large that we are forced to turn corn into ethanol and feed it to our cars, at a net energy loss!

“There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.”
-Dwayne Andreas, then-CEO of Archer Daniels Midland

In other words, it’s highly profitable to turn the products of industrial agriculture—cereal grains and soybeans—into highly processed “food”.

It’s not the snack aisle, the cereal aisle, or even the bread aisle...it’s the profit aisle.

Note that the profit for the processors and middlemen comes out of the pockets of the producer and the consumer. Farmers are squeezed by the 12 cents per pound, and consumers are squeezed by the $4.40 per loaf.

…which looks like a lot until you compare it with 2700%-6400% for grains. Also, unlike grain products, bacon must be stored, shipped, and sold under continuous refrigeration—and it has a much shorter shelf life.

It’s clear that it’s far more profitable to sell us processed grain products than meat, eggs, and vegetables…which leaves a lot of money available to spend on persuading us to buy them.Are you starting to understand why grains are encased in colorful packaging, pushed on us as “heart-healthy” by the government, and advertised continually in all forms of media?

And when we purchase grass-fed beef directly from the rancher, eggs from the farmer, and produce from the grower, we are bypassing the entire monumentally profitable system of industrial agriculture—the railroads, grain elevators, antibiotics, growth hormones, plows, combines, chemical fertilizers (the Haber process, by which ammonium nitrate fertilizer is made, uses 3-5% of world natural gas production!), processors, inspectors, fortifiers, manufacturers, distributors, and advertisers that profit so handsomely by turning cheap grains into expensive food-like substances.

Conclusion: You Are A Radical (And So Am I)

Simply by eating a paleo diet, we have made ourselves enemies of the establishment, and will be treated henceforth as dangerous radicals.

This is not a conspiracy theory. By eschewing commodity crops and advocating the consumption of grass-fed meat, pastured eggs, and local produce, we are making several very, very powerful enemies.

The medical and nutritional establishments hate paleo, because we’re exposing the fact that they’ve been wrong for decades and have killed millions of people with their bad advice.

The agribusinesses and industrial food processors hate paleo, because we’re hurting their business by not buying their highly profitable grain- and soy-based products.

The mainstream media hates paleo, because they profit handsomely from advertising those grain- and soy-based products.

The government hates paleo, because they’re the enforcement arm of big agribusinesses, industrial food processors, and mainstream media—and because their subsidy programs create mountains of surplus grain that must be consumed somehow.

Is anyone surprised that a government which spends billions of dollars subsidizing the production of corn, soy, and wheat, would issue nutritional recommendations emphasizing the consumption of corn, soy, and wheat?

And this is why, despite all their rhetoric, the vegans end up on the same team as Monsanto and Pepsico: their interests are aligned.

I agree: this does look familiar.

In summary:

Expect more hatchet jobs against “paleo” in the media.

Expect more statistical manipulation marketed as “science”.

Expect outright scientific fraud in support of “hearthealthywholegrains” and in opposition to meat and eggs—particularly grass-fed, pastured, and local meats.

Expect subtle attempts to subvert “paleo” by packaging ancestral varieties of grain (e.g. kamut, spelt, amaranth) and obscure fruit extracts (mostly made of apple and grape juice), and selling them back to us in colorful packaging.

Expect even more regulations and restrictions that destroy local, sustainable farming by forcing their nutritionally superior products into the commodity system, instead of allowing us as individuals to buy them directly—which, in the case of meat, we already can’t. (The regulations have got even worse since Joel Salatin wrote this woefully true article, “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.”)

Expect bogus scare stories in the media about the dangers of local meat, eggs, cheese, and produce from small farmers. Expect bogus salmonella scares and fraudulent inspections that claim meaningless or nonexistent bacterial contamination.

Expect school lunches to become even more disgusting and empty of nutrition. If you want your child to grow up healthy, expect to help them pack a lunch every day. Expect to be grilled by suspicious administrators who think you’re damaging your child by feeding them real food.

Expect friends and co-workers to see and believe this propaganda. Expect that you will have to defend your dietary choices against a steadily increasing chorus of suspicion and hostility.

None of this should discourage any of us from continuing to do what’s right for ourselves, our families, our children, and the Earth. We are healthy, we are happy, we are strong, and we will win because everyone else wants to be as healthy as we are.

Be proud of your health and how you’ve attained it. Do not be pushy, but do not apologize for how you eat and live. And, most importantly, be prepared for the storm.

A 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her lifespan than a 20-year-old a decade ago, even though life expectancy has grown.

Actually, it’s even worse than that…more below.

The average number of healthy years has decreased since 1998. We spend fewer years of our lives without disease, even though we live longer.

Apparently 1998 is when the increased lifespan afforded by the advance of medicine was overwhelmed by our deteriorating health.

Functional mobility was defined as the ability to walk up ten steps, walk a quarter mile, stand or sit for 2 hours, and stand, bend or kneel without using special equipment.

Anyone whose otherwise-whole body can’t walk up ten steps, or who can’t bend over without special equipment, is already dead. What kind of life is that?

Actually, I think we know already. It looks like this...

...or this.

A male 20-year-old today can expect to spend 5.8 years over the rest of his life without basic mobility, compared to 3.8 years a decade ago — an additional two years unable to walk up ten steps or sit for two hours. A female 20-year-old can expect 9.8 years without mobility, compared to 7.3 years a decade ago.

So we’ve lost a year to disease—and over TWO YEARS to being so broken, or in so much pain, that we can’t move.

Why is that?

“There is substantial evidence that we have done little to date to eliminate or delay disease while we have prevented death from diseases,” Crimmins explained. “At the same time, there have been substantial increases in the incidences of certain chronic diseases, specifically, diabetes.”

From 1998 to 2006, the prevalence of cardiovascular disease increased among older men, the researchers found. Both older men and women showed an increased prevalence of cancer. Diabetes increased significantly among all adult age groups over age 30.

The proportion of the population with multiple diseases also increased.

In other words, we’re getting diabetic and having heart attacks, with more cancer as a bonus. And Type 2 diabetes tracks neatly behind our massive increase in obesity, charted here in Part 1.

Why is that?

Could it be because we suddenly decided in the 1970s that fat and cholesterol were EVIL—and that everyone needed to eat a lot less meat, eggs, and butter, and a lot more sugar?

Fun fact: cholesterol is absolutely required by all animal life, and is manufactured by almost every cell in our bodies. A 150-pound person contains about 35 grams of cholesterol, and synthesizes about 1 gram a day. If we eat cholesterol, our bodies simply synthesize less. Still scared of the 210 mg in an egg? You shouldn’t be.

Eggs, serum cholesterol, and coronary heart disease. TR Dawber, RJ Nickerson, FN Brand and J Pool. Am J Clin Nutr October 1982 vol. 36 no. 4 617-625
“Using either method of analysis (the actual follow-up from the time of the diet study, (or, as presented here, the 24-yr follow-up from inception of the Study), there was no evidence of any significant association of egg consumption with the incidence of death from all causes, total CHD, myocardial infarction, or angina pectoris (Table 2).”

“Heart-healthy whole grains” are mostly carbohydrates, which is to say: sugar. The glycemic index of “heart-healthy” whole wheat bread (72) is greater than that of Skittles (71). Metabolically, a whole wheat bagel is the same as two bags of Skittles.

Let that sink in for a while. We’re told to eat 7-11 servings of sugar (“grains”) each day…and now we’re surprised that we’re fat and diabetic.

“The growing problem of lifelong obesity and increases in hypertension and high cholesterol are a sign that health may not be improving with each generation,” Crimmins said. “We do not appear to be moving to a world where we die without experiencing significant periods of disease, functioning loss, and disability.”

Did you catch that? We were told to eat low-fat, low-cholesterol foods, so we did…and now we have hypertension and high cholesterol!

The “lipid hypothesis” was a giant, uncontrolled experiment on an entire nation. It has failed catastrophically. More people have been killed by Ancel Keys, the McGovern committee, the CSPI, and assorted hangers-on like Ornish and Pritikin than were killed in the Rwanda genocide…

…and the death toll continues to mount.

How many millions more will die before the US government and the medical profession abandon the failed “lipid hypothesis”, and its zombie avatar the “food pyramid”?

Support gnolls.org by making your Amazon.com purchases through this affiliate link:

It costs you nothing, and I get a small spiff. Thanks! -JS

.

Subscribe to Posts

Gnolls In Your Inbox!
Sign up for the sporadic yet informative gnolls.org newsletter. Since I don't update every day, this is a great way to keep abreast of important content. (Your email will not be sold or shared.)
IMPORTANT! If you do not receive a confirmation email, check your spam folder.

Login/Registerfor the forums, and to leave comments that link to your websiteRegister | Login